Maybe next time the police will leave out a grand piano, in white, emblazoned with the metropolitan police logo. But the protesters' concrete experience of the state's cynicism and lies has to be worth more than a trashed decoy van, just in terms of citizenship education.
Most people must understand, at some level, that the point of this government is the restitution of nineteenth century social relations. Even their lying propaganda is nineteenth century. Unless one of these protests succeeds, the government probably will.
A recent column in the Guardian by Slavoj Zizek managed to include a quotation that was anti Jewish in tendency and anti Gypsy in substance. This week, Jonathan Jones's column manages to misrepresent the students' protest against increased tuition fees, and provide an example, in the author's muddled prose, of the priggishness and petty ignorance that the present university system is alleged to inculcate.
Jones attempts to explain Nietzsche's concept of the "dionysian" in art, of which he is reminded by some pictures he's seen of the students' protest. Perhaps imagining himself to be writing from Mount Olympus, he sees no reason to mention Nietzsche, who existed in a particular historical context, preferring to regard his theory as holy writ. Jones either feels his readers don't deserve to know the context of the ideas they're being fed, or Jones wants to take credit for them: either as their originator, or as a Derek Acorah of philosophy, channeling the voices of the ghosts.
The students' protest was entirely rational in intention. It clearly expressed an open antagonism. It didn't coincide with Jonathan Jones's personal plans and intentions, and so is presented as its opposite: "irrational, savage, destructive", "all the suppressed antagonisms of daily life explode in riot". With or without the intervention of all the gods of wine, beer and stout, Jonathan Jones seems to be having trouble getting out of his own head.
"The biological necessity for morality arises because, for the species to survive, any animal must have, on the one hand some egoism -a strong urge to get food for himself and to defend his means of livelihood; also- extending egoism from the individual to the family to fight for the interests of his mate and young. On the other hand, social life is impossible unless the pursuit of self-interest is mitigated by respect and compassion for others. A society of unmitigated egoists would knock itself to pieces; a perfectly altruistic individual would soon starve. There is a conflict between contrary tendencies, each of which is necessary to existence, and there must be a set of rules to reconcile them. Moreover, there must be some mechanism to make an individual keep the rules when they conflict with his immediate advantage."
There are literary revolutions, and there are political revolutions, and they are two separate things; but neither has ever been launched in a Wild Bean Café.
"The "Cultural Revolution" had nothing revolutionary about it except the name, and nothing cultural about it except the initial tactical pretext. It was a power struggle waged at the top between a handful of men and behind the smokescreen of a fictitious mass movement."
Herr Sarrazin objects precisely to Arabs and Turks' retention of petit bourgeois modes of living, and their failure to enthusiastically take up positions as shelf stackers at the Aldi. Together with Chancellor Merkel's lamentations about these same workers' lack of reverence for Pombär, these comments wonderfully illustrate the decomposition of rational thought among the German élite.
Neoliberalism is an ideology that does not realise its worldview. The Roman Empire, or the Islamic Caliphate, attempted to impose a system their leaders approved. Even the Soviet Union imposed an economic system - the bureaucratic command economy - that its leadership understood and approved. Neoliberalism is a sort of pastoral fantasy, created by Western capitalism's own bureaucracy, in place of the scientific analysis that they are incapable of producing.
Zizek's latest thing might be thought of as a sort of Pepsi challenge, where Guardian readers get to decide if they like the cool flavours of Robert Brasillach - if reading a newspaper is tasting blind.
A good method for analysing things is, start with what is really happening.
Some British workers get that the point of immigration is to keep wages low. Those that are both self interested and economically literate tend to be opposed to immigration for this reason. The media and government apparatus responds to this constituency by shrilly accusing them of racism, and offering them various ways of expressing this purely economic grievance, involving shrill expressions of racism, in various strengths, and no programme for improving their economic circumstances. The notion that British workers are seeking to preserve a pure British race, or a pristine British culture, is part of this process of recuperation, by which the plutocracy seek to defame or divert people critical of its policies. But this imposture is absurd, because Britain has been racially diverse for a long time, and its culture is capitalism.
Dr Zizek’s shoddiest op-ed yet basically rehashes the British plutocracy’s propaganda, in an attempt to convince Guardian reading “progressives” that the working class are “a paranoid multitude”, subject to violent racist fantasies, with the inference that the “progressive” middle class ought to rally round the oriflamme of plutocratic “liberalism”.
I realise this simple explanation doesn’t account for all of Zizek’s rhetoric: his nonsensical history, his neglected fascist “thinkers”, his collages of disparate ideas dressed up as an argument, and his media personality, apparently delighted to talk about “half-Jews” “and so on“. I’m not sure that Zizek “ironically” represents the true spirit of European plutocracy, while posing as its adversary, or anything like that. Really, I think he’s just a bit of a cock.
In a way, I am mocking professional economists who do not get that their work is as arbitrary, and as unscientific, as the whole Springtime for Germany scene. But I still ought to be able to define my terms reasonably exactly:
An agency of control is the agency responsible for making decisions about the supply of resources,
A sentimental agency of control has cognisance over the operations that generate its net income, and can alter those operations in order to maximise that income. This ought to include claims that are necessarily claims on surplus production,
e.g.: capitalists claiming profit, workers claiming wages, and the government imposing taxes on profits, capital gains, and high incomes.
A naïve agency of control does not have cognisance over the operations that generate its income, and can only attempt to claim income arbitrarily, thereby either fortuitously making a succesful para-sentimental claim, or causing unemployment of people or capital,
e.g.: landlords claiming rent, banks profiting from inflation, goverment imposing taxes on necessary consumption or poll taxes.
The point is, that an argument about the naïvety of the administration of a country is not just an argument about the naïvety of its tax system, but needs to take into account the structure of property, and the banking system, and their claims on production.
Barthes said that while a little formalism takes one away from history, a lot of formalism takes one back to it. One might include, within the scope of formalism, the normative impositions of bureaucratic organisations. The Economist's designers' forgetting, and pretending to forget, what it meant to be a punk, what it meant to be a radical, and what Britain's current government actually represents, finally results in the expression of an unwarranted truth: that the current British government is essentially nihilistic. It really is.
Toward the end of his Confessions of an English Opium Eater, De Quincey discusses a pamphlet he tried to put together about Ricardo's economics. I remembered this story, wrongly as it turns out, as being about how De Quincey tried to apply some sort of method from German Idealism, or some kind of drug wizardry, to perfect Ricardo's system. Actually, De Quincey says his ideas could be expressed with algebra. I understand De Quincey's essay was published with his collected works, so maybe I should check it out.
It might be that the amazing aridity of Ricardo's prose contributed to his book's success, because it invited amateur literateurs to feel they could improve on Ricardo's arguments. People today might reasonably argue that Marx really did apply the wizardry of German Idealism, specifically Hegel's philosophy, to Ricardo, even if De Quincey didn't.
But a better marriage might be made between Ricardo's (actually Malthus's) theory of rent and Schiller's theory of naïve and sentimental art.
The theory of rent effectively hypostises -
naïve and sentimental agencies of control.
Capitalist production ought to have a sentimental agency of control, because the capitalist ought to be able to alter his level of production, methods and inputs to maximise his profit. Ricardo argues that rent should also have a sentimental agency of control, because it's against the landowner's interest to fail to rent his land by demanding an excessive rent that cannot be paid. This counterexample of a landowner trying to impose an unpayable rent is an example of a naïve agency of control. Basically, sentimental agencies are good, in the way economics thinks things are good, and naïve agencies are bad.
With these categories, we can easily state the point of neoliberal economics, which is to replace all naïve agencies of control with sentimental agencies of control. Ricardo insists that rent is always subject to a sentimental agency of control, but this isn't necessarily true, as anyone who's noticed the thousands of empty flats in this country will attest. Neoliberal economists are very keen on the theme of the governments naïvety: its subjection of taxation to a naïve agency of control. But the naïvety or sentimentality of the three main forms of claims on the productive economy ought to be considered together:
property - property income (rent) banking - inflation government - taxation
When Hegel expressed his observation, that consciousness of social forms as historical forms is often coincidental with their decline, with the aphorism "the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk", he had no way of knowing whether this principle might apply to Top Gun, Trading Places and Beverley Hills Cop.
I'm not sure if the popular background of neoliberalism is disappearing. In any case, the systematisation of pop neoliberalism probably won't speed its decline. But during the 80s and 90s a great mass of the Western professional class found it incredibly persuasive, to the extent that it was taken as nonpolitical modern thinking, rather than an ideology among others, and an ideology bound up with the entrenchment of capitalist dictatorship.
These ideas certainly influenced the cinema of that period, to the extent that a lot of 80s and 90s films hardly do anything more than preach pop neoliberalism.
For instance, if we look at Beverley Hills Cop, it seems that the writers of this film had a strong sense of the rottenness of excessive privilege and excessive bureaucracy, demonstrated by Beverley Hills and its ineficient police force. The environment this creates is unstable and malign, producing naïve and jobsworth cops, neo-feudal Eurotrash gangsters, and gay art lovers.
Capitalism as a whole isn't meant to be like this, it's a salutary lesson about the dangers of market failure. The real Beverley Hills is only pleasant at a superficial level; when viewed through the spectacles of pop neoliberalism, it is flabby and inefficient.
Anyway, just as estrangement from the market is seen to have a degrading effect on people, close contact with the market is seen to have an invigorating effect. So, the writers of Beverley Hills Cop seem to have had the idea that a streetwise person from outside their circle of privilege really ought to be able to play out his decadent contemporaries in Beverley Hills, purely on account of having "marinated" in an environment characterised by strong market imperatives.
Beverley Hills Cop would still work without having a black cop playing out decadent white Californians. The film could have had a streetwise Hispanic cop, or an Australian cop played by Paul Hogan. It wouldn't have worked with Eddie Murphy playing a cop who used to be a Trappist monk, or a professor of philosophy. At least it wouldn't have worked for a generation that voted for Reagan.
Described by Claude McKay as a "worthless book", Mylius's treatise is like Keynes before Keynes, and without Keynes's mistakes. Proudhon had not come to that learned man's attention.
Anyway, Mylius was the bookkeeper for Max Eastman's Liberator, in which capacity he was able to "privatize" a great deal of money from the magazine's funds. I mention this, but really, why should a person have to have an account of their crimes hung round their neck, like a stupid cow bell? An ordinary person, I mean.
In the comments under this post at the blaawg Lenins Tomb someone asks:
"I sometimes see leftists argue that the current bourgeoisie is destroying itself by immiserating wage-laborers. They claim that the capitalist system requires workers to buy wage-goods at a certain level, or production will be unbought and profits unrealized. But couldn't the solution be to reduce wages (and increase exploitation) and then sell more ... capital goods, government goods, and luxury goods"?
This cat is asking, what if the bourgeoisie won't realise their surplus value or allow real wages to increase? I suppose in an economy with a commodity for money, there would be permanent deflation, with effective demand being continually reduced by the hoarding of money, and a certain amount of involuntary unemployment. However, this isn't what we see in contemporary capitalism, where there tends to be unemployment and appreciable inflation.
Suppose we really had the two constraints listed above: the bourgeoisie won't realise as production the whole of the difference between feasible production and necessary production, and they won't pay wages high enough to cover the production they won't realise, could this situation be resolved by the bourgeoisie lending money to the workers?
In this case, it would be possible to achieve full employment in the short term, but to maintain it, it would be necessary for workers' net borrowing to continually exceed their repayments: effectively it would be necessary for workers' borrowing to constantly increase. Since there's a technical limit as to how much workers can repay, this isn't possible. At some point a recession must ensue.
It seems that you can generate cycles of expansion and recession, in hypothetical models, by making the assumption that the bourgeoisie impose an artificial maximum income on themselves. This would be an alternative way of generating cyclical dynamics in a model of capitalist development. It's a different way of getting a Keynes or Minsky type theory. I'm not sure it's strictly correct, though.
***
Actually, re comrade's trip to Bradford, isn't the EDL basically a government scheme to employ ex soldiers with Smallhausen Syndrome? to put off anyone opposed to the war?
It is very sad when people end up with schizophrenia, because of drug and alcohol problems, because they've served as soldiers in Afghanistan, or when people lose arms and legs serving in this war. But the propaganda line of the charity "help for heroes" - that the war in Afganistan is heroic because it inflicts injury on British Army soldiers - is ridiculous. I suppose people think that the tangible benefits that this charity provides to injured soldiers makes the tacked on propaganda message OK. I would have thought they were two different things. It seems that, if you dole out a few pounds to the needy, you get to decide what's true and what's not true, just like in the middle ages. What might British Army soldiers have done in Afghanistan?
Perhaps they locked up a taxi driver for years in a metal container, on the basis of false rumours,
or, fired missiles at a wedding reception, then paid $500 to the relatives of the people who died,
or, machine gunned a bus, then falsely claimed the people who died were resistance fighters,
etc etc etc
As I understand it, mostly they sit in the base, or patrol half a mile round the base, checking for IEDs. It would have been better to use the name "help for heroes" for a charity providing for retired racehorses, and collect money for former soldiers in British Legion boxes.
this is from an archive of articles by Henry Flynt, criticising the pretensions of the artistic culture, so called, into which he'd been - "elevated" - I suppose is the word. There are also some interesting pieces on the Henry Flynt site about Economics and Hill Billy music.
I suppose I'm lucky in being able to be unserious about serious things. Henry Flynt's general attitude is dead right in this picture from 1963. I also find it pretty funny.
is this true? The public's attention isn't fulfilling any useful function of itself for the advertiser. The advertiser wants the attention of the public only to achieve higher profits, by selling more or selling at a higher price. But that profit has to be realised from total social production, which is diminished by resources being allocated from production to advertising*. The advertiser's gain is the social product he's able to arrogate to himself. The advertising he commissions does not form part of this product, or anyone else's final product or make active means of production more productive. As a social phenomenon the advertiser makes a deduction from the total social product in order to privately appropriate a larger share, in absolute terms, of that product.
The use of advertising tends to diminish society's privately realised surplus product. Consequently, it tends to diminish the rate of profit on revenue. If Daffy Duck's image rights increase in value through advertising, this doesn't mean that society's total surplus product has increased. The point of advertising is the redistribution of the surplus product, not its creation. In any case, capital values in monopoly capitalism tend to be related to profit values by artificially low rates of discount**.
I don't expect anyone will be convinced by this, but really, looking at ads isn't labouring, and we aren't contributing by doing it.
*leaving aside the unlikely possibility of redistribution improving productivity beyond the deadweight advertising cost that engendered it. Index number problems come up with distribution changes, but one can hardly justify calling advertising productive on account of index number problems.
** i.e. lower than the technically determined rate of profit on the commodity value of active means of production.
What's clever about Dejan's parody is that it doesn't just exaggerate Jodi Dean's analysis, but it exaggerates one aspect while forgetting about another aspect.
Essentially, the parody sets up a contrived choice for the sociologist studying American people, between seeing Americans as:
a. dispossessed and disenfranchised proletars
or
b. comfortable and enfranchised citizens
Jodi Dean's picture of Americans as belonging to category a. is portrayed as ridiculous (I don't know if this is Dean's real position: I haven't read her book. I'm just going by the parody). Consequently category b. ought to be correct. But really, somewhere in the middle would be more correct, because most Americans don't have real political representation, and quite a few are really immiserated. The desire for middle class Americans to have political representation really doesn't necessitate them identifying themselves with nineteenth century factory workers.
But, in a daring dialectical twist, Dejan pretends to have forgotten that Dean's apparent category of barelife proletars presupposes a social technology productive of a proletarariat. A second contrived choice is established concerning the degree of autonomy of Americans, who might be:
a. free to choose freely
or
b. constrained in their choices
Dejan allows that Dean's analysis assumes a. rather than b. and that the Americans really want everything they get, from spectacular wars for the benefit of Dick Cheney to abstract digi porn. They are no longer interested in sex with other humans, prefering the endless autistic reprogramming of the fragments of the human sexual past. In reality, most Americans must be fairly constrained in their choices, but some of them probably do really want it.
If we map Dejan's categories onto the sexuation graph, you can see what I mean.
